Marketing analytics is the practice of using technology, applications, and methods to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. The practice can also measure the impact of individual marketing initiatives or efforts, such as advertising campaigns, emails, content, and social media posts. Essentially, marketing analytics analyzes, tracks, and measures the performance of overall campaigns and efforts according to predefined metrics. For instance, a company can use sales revenue attributed to an advertising campaign about a promotion to measure its performance.
With many organizations using a mix of traditional and digital media, marketing analytics methods and tools have been able to combine performance data across multiple advertising sources. This performance data provides marketing analytics benefits related to not only assessing the effectiveness of current efforts but also providing insights about future decisions. Integrated performance data that is easily accessible from a single tool can provide both macro and micro views, allowing marketers to make strategic decisions on advertising spend based on a larger picture.
Summary of Marketing Analytics Benefits
Besides providing marketers and executives with an overall picture of campaign performance, marketing analytics provides the following advantages:
- Perform A/B tests on various creative elements, such as copy and content, call to actions, images, and designs.
- Pinpoint what types of creative messages are working and which ones are not. This can also be identified according to different audiences or market segments.
- Identify trends among various promotional campaigns, promotional programs, products/services, media consumption behaviors, and audience or market sentiments.
- Provide data on the return on investment (ROI) for specific campaigns and individual marketing efforts, such as webinars and live events.
- Measure growth trends and changes in audience behaviors, such as shifts towards responding to email and social media versus print or television advertising.
- Help predict the results of future campaigns or individual marketing efforts.
- Identify areas for improvement or market opportunities.
- Help shape overall marketing strategies and determine when shifts in strategies are necessary.
- Monitor consumer behaviors and responsiveness.
Identifying and Using the Right Tools
To reap the rewards of marketing analytics benefits, each company or organization often has to experiment with different tools and methods to get it “right.” Outlining the organization’s goals, what needs to be measured, and why, can provide a solid blueprint for finding the optimal tools. Some analytics tools have free versions or features for marketers to try out before upgrading to paid versions. For instance, Moz’s keyword tool has a free version that lets copywriters and content strategists perform basic keyword research for blog posts and other forms of digital content. The Pro or paid version expands available features to advanced SEO research and tracking.
Other tools like HubSpot and Domo reveal trends and performance across various digital channels, such as web and landing pages, emails, and online content. From a centralized dashboard, marketers can view overall performance trends for blog posts, email campaigns, and landing pages. Performance metrics are also available for individual pieces of content, web pages, and emails. Comparisons can be made according to specific periods, such as year-to-year, month-to-month, rolling 90-day or quarterly stretches. Tools like HubSpot can provide complete content management or customer management systems, integrating both current and potential customer contact information.
Analytics tools, such as SEMRush, can provide marketers with comprehensive comparisons between leading competitors. Companies can see how internal web pages and advertising campaigns are ranking in relation to competitors that may be targeting the same keywords and similar audiences. Comparison tools can also help identify content or keyword opportunities that marketers may have previously overlooked.
Regardless of the set of tools a company chooses, there are a variety of ways to approach the objective of leveraging marketing analytics benefits. While some companies choose to handle everything in-house, many organizations use the services of digital advertising and analytics partners, like Digilant to help maximize ROIs on advertising budgets. Since Digilant specializes in omnichannel marketing and analytics and is made up of veteran specialists, we can lend institutional knowledge and critical and unbiased perspective of advertising performance to in-house teams.
Digilant can complete audits of digital advertising efforts and build custom analytics dashboards to connect and visualize advertising data in a single view. Reports and visualizations can easily be shared and interpreted by your team and key stakeholders and can save you precious time and resources by eliminating manual work and the need for expensive data storage, preparation, and visualization tools.
Now is the time to start reaping the rewards of marketing analytics benefits. To get a complete view of your current marketing and advertising initiatives and to identify opportunities to get more out of your advertising investments, contact us today.